Processors-sockets-cores-CPUs

Processors, cores, CPUs

Cores are discrete processing elements and therefore represent a very important look at our computers. By looking at cores we can see how many independent parallel actions can be taken by the processors at one time. This is very important for understanding the scaling and capacity abilities of our computers. A computer can only truly parallelize to the extent of its “core” capacity.

Cores are hardware. Cores are the number of processors within your physical CPU chipset.

(Multi-core processors) This has happened within the past few years due to advances in processor manufacturing. Prior to this we had hyper threading. Prior to that we had only single core processors (we generically called them CPUs).

Processors were originally developed with only one core. Multi-core processors were developed in the early 2000s by Intel, AMD and others. Multicore processors may have two or more cores.

Each socket is capable of holding one physical processor. A CPU socket or CPU slot is a mechanical component(s) that provides mechanical and electrical connections between a microprocessor and a printed circuit board (PCB).A socket is a physical connector allows a chip to be connected to a board.

What we really care about is the number of processors that are installed, as a socket could be empty.

Our final example is the Sun SunFire T2000 server. The SunFire T2000 is a single socket motherboard designed to hold one UltraSparc T processor. This is a true one-way server. Each UltraSparc T processor has a single die / CPU. Each CPU contains either four, six or eight cores depending on the purchased configuration – we will use eightin our example.

Each of these eightcores has fourthread handlers. In this machine we therefore see a one-way server with a single processor with a single CPU containing eight cores and a total of thirty-two simultaneous multithreads being presented to the operating system as thirty-two logical processors.

As you can see the issue of determining the number of processors, cores, CPUs, etc. is extremely difficult.

It is clear why people have become confused and why marketing is playing such a significant role in determining the public’s perceptions of these architectural components.

The most important components to keep clear are the counts for way, processor, core and logical processor (virtual processor, processing thread, execution engine, etc.)

Underlying component issues, while important to be semantically correct and to understand the working of processors, are still underlying components and should not be thought of as being the defining characteristics of our computer systems today.